People Looking Up, Pen Theatre

It's strange to return to this play, some three months after watching; indeed this review centres on a passage I wrote just a couple of days after seeing People Looking Up, but abandoned unintentionally, though perhaps necessarily for the reflective process. Over these months as I have mulled over the experience, compared it to other plays, and situated it within the dimensions of my personal theatrical and artistic taste, one image lingers. The image is in fact more of a feeling - tying a shoelace - metaphoric for the unique way People Looking Up came to connect disparate worlds, initially fragmented and entangled, into something comprehensible, concrete, encompassing. Whilst the genre of naturalistic, minimalistic, small-cast productions is perhaps the defining style of (post)modern Western theatre, an endearing novelty surrounded the intricacy of this playwriting. Not least, in its expansion beyond contemporary realism, to the ethereal realms of space and time.

Nonetheless stripped back in its style - three actors performing to an audience of Londoners, slightly grumpy about their leg room, cramped into a small theatre - the script could take centre stage. The writing straddled banality and fantasy; concrete lived experience and the abstract spaces of imagination and longing for some other, non-earthly, reality; the scientific and artistic conceptualisations of the world; the painful experiences of love and loss, and the playful possibilities for existence through such pain. Boundaries were blurred no more saliently than in the use of a vacuum and a bright globe of light as the main props. At one point close to the curtain, the latter of these became a member of the audience, through which the characters traversed on their voyage. 

Sometimes, however, I perceived a disconnect between the audience and the story: the script difficult to follow in it's multi-perspectival non-linear structure, and the acting slightly too exaggerated - lines delivered too fast and over-emphasised - to earn our emotional engagement, not just appease our desire for entertainment. Over-compensation for the play's simplicity and charm. At times, perhaps even a distraction from the intriguing dynamics between Martin, Petra and Singer - not least, Singer's child-like (or, it is unclear, actually child) world, and the task of discerning the nature and meaning of their quest. United clearly on the level of human experience (as noted, especially of love and grief) People Looking Up shone a sensitive light on pain. Quickly, though not mitigating the ability for reflection on those feelings, the air gained a lightness through bathos. We were suspended as in space, wheezing at Singer's hilariously eccentric comedic timing.

And yet, there was so much depth to him. To all of the characters in fact, and to the story which tied a neat bow on each foot, anchoring me in some way back to the ground. I came away from People Looking Up feeling like I had witnessed a glimpse into the multitude. "We are the message" they said. There was nothing more, nothing less than these characters, than this experience they experienced together and we experienced with them in this cramped exposed-brick theatre. For me this was about the way a child's traumatic memory can become immortalised in their experience of the world. How imagination and hope can provide an escape from past pain and the fear of future pain. How space can construct itself around disruptions to time. How connection can facilitate meaning, even if only through absurdity.

The message I received was an intricate philosophical one. But I sensed there were 50 other stories here, told that same night. At least one for each of us on that spaceship.

Watched on: 05.03.2025

Rating: 4/5